The Secret of Father Brown · The Mirror of the Magistrate (2/3)

“Yes, it’s pretty clear what happened,” assented the detective. “The murderer entered by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let him in. There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot that hit the glass, though they might have broken it with a stray kick or anything. Gwynne managed to free himself and fled into the garden, where he was pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that’s the whole story of the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round the other rooms.”

The other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed significantly to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer of the library desk.

“Looks as if he was expecting this,” he said; “yet it seems queer he didn’t take it with him when he went out into the hall.”

Eventually they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front door, Father Brown letting his eye rove around in a rather absentminded fashion. The two corridors, monotonously papered in the same grey and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy floridity of the few early Victorian ornaments, the green rust that devoured the bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the broken mirror.

“They say it’s bad luck to break a looking-glass,” he said. “This looks like the very house of ill-luck. There’s something about the very furniture⁠—”

“That’s rather odd,” said Bagshaw sharply. “I thought the front door would be shut, but it’s left on the latch.”

There was no reply; and they passed out of the front door into the front garden, a narrower and more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a curiously clipped hedge with a hole in it, like a green cave, under the shadow of which some broken steps peeped out.

Father Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked his head under it. A few moments after he had disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet voice in conversation above their heads, as if he were talking to somebody at the top of a tree. The detective followed, and found that the curious covered stairway led to what looked like a broken bridge, overhanging the darker and emptier spaces of the garden. It just curled round the corner of the house, bringing in sight the field of coloured lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic of some abandoned architectural fancy of building a sort of terrace on arches across the lawn. Bagshaw thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to find anybody in the small hours between night and morning; but he was not looking at the details of it just then. He was looking at the man who was found.

As the man stood with his back turned, a small man in light grey clothes, the one outstanding feature about him was a wonderful head of hair, as yellow and radiant as the head of a huge dandelion. It was literally outstanding like a halo, and something in that association made the face, when it was slowly and sulkily turned on them, rather a shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an oval face of the mildly angelic sort; but the face was crabbed and elderly, with a powerful jowl and a short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of a pugilist.

“This is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I understand,” said Father Brown, as calmly as if he were introducing two people in a drawing-room.

“Whoever he is,” said Bagshaw, “I must trouble him to come with me and answer a few questions.”

Mr. Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of self-expression when it came to the answering of questions. There in that corner of the old garden, as the grey twilight before dawn began to creep over the heavy hedges and the broken bridge, and afterwards in a succession of circumstances and stages of legal inquiry that grew more and more ominous, he refused to say anything, except that he had intended to call on Sir Humphrey Gwynne, but had not done so because he could not get anyone to answer the bell. When it was pointed out that the door was practically open, he snorted. When it was hinted that the hour was somewhat late, he snarled. The little that he said was obscure, either because he really knew hardly any English, or because he knew better than to know any. His opinions seemed to be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who could follow it; and it seemed possible that his business with the judge, and perhaps his quarrel with the judge, had been something in the anarchist line. Gwynne was known to have had something of a mania about Bolshevist spies, as he had about German spies. Anyhow, one coincidence, only a few moments after his capture, confirmed Bagshaw in the impression that the case must be taken seriously. As they went out of the front gate into the street, they so happened to encounter yet another neighbour, Buller, the cigar merchant from next door, conspicuous by his brown, shrewd face and the unique orchid in his buttonhole; for he had a name in that branch of horticulture. Rather to the surprise of the rest, he hailed his neighbour, the poet, in a matter-of-fact manner, almost as if he had expected to see him.

“Hallo, here we are again,” he said. “Had a long talk with old Gwynne, I suppose?”

“Sir Humphrey Gwynne is dead,” said Bagshaw. “I am investigating the case and I must ask you to explain.”

Buller stood as still as the lamppost beside him, possibly stiffened with surprise. The red end of his cigar brightened and darkened rhythmically, but his brown face was in shadow; when he spoke it was with quite a new voice.

“I only mean,” he said, “that when I passed two hours ago Mr. Orm was going in at this gate to see Sir Humphrey.”

“He says he hasn’t seen him yet,” observed Bagshaw, “or even been into the house.”

“It’s a long time to stand on the doorstep,” observed Buller.

“Yes,” said Father Brown, “it’s rather a long time to stand in the street.”

“I’ve been home since then,” said the cigar merchant. “Been writing letters and came out again to post them.”

“You’ll have to tell all that later,” said Bagshaw. “Good night⁠—or good morning.”

The trial of Osric Orm for the murder of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, which filled the newspapers for so many weeks, really turned entirely on the same crux as that little talk under the lamppost, when the grey-green dawn was breaking about the dark streets and gardens. Everything came back to the enigma of those two empty hours between the time when Buller saw Orm going in at the garden gate, and the time when Father Brown found him apparently still lingering in the garden. He had certainly had the time to commit six murders; and might almost have committed them for want of something to do; for he could give no coherent account of what he was doing. It was argued by the prosecution that he had also the opportunity, as the front door was unlatched, and the side-door into the larger garden left standing open. The court followed, with considerable interest, Bagshaw’s clear reconstruction of the struggle in the passage, of which the traces were so evident; indeed, the police had since found the shot that had shattered the glass. Finally, the hole in the hedge to which he had been tracked, had very much the appearance of a hiding-place. On the other hand, Sir Matthew Blake, the very able counsel for the defence, turned this last argument the other way; asking why any man should entrap himself in a place without possible exit, when it would obviously be much more sensible to slip out into the street. Sir Matthew Blake also made effective use of the mystery that still rested upon the motive for the murder. Indeed, upon this point, the passages between Sir Matthew Blake and Sir Arthur Travers, the equally brilliant advocate for the prosecution, turned rather to the advantage of the prisoner. Sir Arthur could only throw out suggestions about a Bolshevist conspiracy which sounded a little thin. But when it came to investigating the facts of Orm’s mysterious behaviour that night, he was considerably more effective.

The prisoner went into the witness-box, chiefly because his astute counsel calculated that it would create a bad impression if he did not. But he was almost as uncommunicative to his own counsel as to the prosecuting counsel. Sir Arthur Travers made all possible capital out of his stubborn silence, but did not succeed in breaking it. Sir Arthur was a long, gaunt man, with a long, cadaverous face, in striking contrast to the sturdy figure and bright, birdlike eye of Sir Matthew Blake. But if Sir Matthew suggested a very cocksure sort of cock-sparrow, Sir Arthur might more truly have been compared to a crane or stork; as he leaned forward, prodding the poet with questions, his long nose might have been a long beak.

“Do you mean to tell the jury,” he asked, in tones of grating incredulity, “that you never went in to see the deceased gentleman at all?”

“No!” replied Orm shortly.

“You wanted to see him, I suppose. You must have been very anxious to see him. Didn’t you wait two whole hours in front of his front door?”

“Yes,” replied the other.

“And yet you never even noticed the door was open?”

“No,” said Orm.

“What in the world were you doing for two hours in somebody else’s front garden?” insisted the barrister. “You were doing something I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a secret?” asked Sir Arthur, with adamantine jocularity.

“It’s a secret from you,” answered the poet.

It was upon this suggestion of a secret that Sir Arthur seized in developing his line of accusation. With a boldness which some thought unscrupulous, he turned the very mystery of the motive, which was the strongest part of his opponent’s case, into an argument for his own. He gave it as the first fragmentary hint of some far-flung and elaborate conspiracy, in which a patriot had perished like one caught in the coils of an octopus.

“Yes,” he cried in a vibrating voice, “my learned friend is perfectly right! We do not know the exact reason why this honourable public servant was murdered. We shall not know the reason why the next public servant is murdered. If my learned friend himself falls a victim to his eminence, and the hatred which the hellish powers of destruction feel for the guardians of law, he will be murdered, and he will not know the reason. Half the decent people in this court will be butchered in their beds, and we shall not know the reason. And we shall never know the reason and never arrest the massacre, until it has depopulated our country, so long as the defence is permitted to stop all proceedings with this stale tag about ‘motive,’ when every other fact in the case, every glaring incongruity, every gaping silence, tells us that we stand in the presence of Cain.”

“I never knew Sir Arthur so excited,” said Bagshaw to his group of companions afterwards. “Some people are saying he went beyond the usual limit and that the prosecutor in a murder case oughtn’t to be so vindictive. But I must say there was something downright creepy about that little goblin with the yellow hair, that seemed to play up to the impression. I was vaguely recalling, all the time, something that De Quincey says about Mr. Williams, that ghastly criminal who slaughtered two whole families almost in silence. I think he says that Williams had hair of a vivid, unnatural yellow; and that he thought it had been dyed by a trick learned in India, where they dye horses green or blue. Then there was his queer, stony silence, like a troglodyte’s; I’ll never deny that it all worked me up until I felt there was a sort of monster in the dock. If that was only Sir Arthur’s eloquence, then he certainly took a heavy responsibility in putting so much passion into it.”

“He was a friend of poor Gwynne’s, as a matter of fact,” said Underhill, more gently; “a man I know saw them hobnobbing together after a great legal dinner lately. I daresay that’s why he feels so strongly in this case. I suppose it’s doubtful whether a man ought to act in such a case on mere personal feeling.”

“He wouldn’t,” said Bagshaw. “I bet Sir Arthur Travers wouldn’t act only on feeling, however strongly he felt. He’s got a very stiff sense of his own professional position. He’s one of those men who are ambitious even when they’ve satisfied their ambition. I know nobody who’d take more trouble to keep his position in the world. No; you’ve got hold of the wrong moral to his rather thundering sermon. If he lets himself go like that, it’s because he thinks he can get a conviction, anyhow, and wants to put himself at the head of some political movement against the conspiracy he talks about. He must have some very good reason for wanting to convict Orm and some very good reason for thinking he can do it. That means that the facts will support him. His confidence doesn’t look well for the prisoner.” He became conscious of an insignificant figure in the group.

“Well, Father Brown,” he said with a smile; “what do you think of our judicial procedure?”

“Well,” replied the priest rather absently, “I think the thing that struck me most was how different men look in their wigs. You talk about the prosecuting barrister being so tremendous. But I happened to see him take his wig off for a minute, and he really looks quite a different man. He’s quite bald, for one thing.”

“I’m afraid that won’t prevent his being tremendous,” answered Bagshaw. “You don’t propose to found the defence on the fact that the prosecuting counsel is bald, do you?”

“Not exactly,” said Father Brown good-humouredly. “To tell the truth, I was thinking how little some kinds of people know about other kinds of people. Suppose I went among some remote people who had never even heard of England. Suppose I told them that there is a man in my country who won’t ask a question of life and death, until he has put an erection made of horsehair on the top of his head, with little tails behind, and grey corkscrew curls at the side, like an Early Victorian old woman. They would think he must be rather eccentric; but he isn’t at all eccentric; he’s only conventional. They would think so, because they don’t know anything about English barristers; because they don’t know what a barrister is. Well, that barrister doesn’t know what a poet is. He doesn’t understand that a poet’s eccentricities wouldn’t seem eccentric to other poets. He thinks it odd that Orm should walk about in a beautiful garden for two hours, with nothing to do. God bless my soul! a poet would think nothing of walking about in the same backyard for ten hours if he had a poem to do. Orm’s own counsel was quite as stupid. It never occurred to him to ask Orm the obvious question.”

“What question do you mean?” asked the other.

“Why, what poem he was making up, of course,” said Father Brown rather impatiently. “What line he was stuck at, what epithet he was looking for, what climax he was trying to work up to. If there were any educated people in court, who know what literature is, they would have known well enough whether he had had anything genuine to do. You’d have asked a manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but nobody seems to consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It’s done by doing nothing.”

“That’s all very well,” replied the detective; “but why did he hide? Why did he climb up that crooked little stairway and stop there; it led nowhere.”

“Why, because it led nowhere, of course,” cried Father Brown explosively. “Anybody who clapped eyes on that blind alley ending in midair might have known an artist would want to go there, just as a child would.”